How to Color Grade a Photo in Photoshop – Day 21

Get the Cinematic Look

Every film you have ever watched was color graded, and almost none of it announces itself. The shadows lean one way, the highlights lean the other, and the whole thing feels like it belongs to a single world.

Photoshop has that same tool set. It lives in the Camera Raw filter, it is identical to the one in Lightroom, and it is entirely non-destructive.

Correction First, Grading Second

Day 20 was about correction — making neutral things neutral, which has a right answer. Grading has no right answer at all. It is taste, and the only test is whether you like it.

Do them in that order. Grading on top of a color cast means fighting a problem you could have removed in one click.

Smart Object First, Again

Filter > Convert for Smart Filters, then Filter > Camera Raw Filter. Grades are the thing you most often want to revisit, weaken or throw away entirely, and this is what makes all three possible.

The Color Grading Panel and Its Views

Open the Color Grading section in the right-hand panel. The buttons across the top switch how the same controls are displayed.

Three-Way

Shadows, midtones and highlights as three small wheels at once. Good for an overview, cramped for fine work.

Single Wheel

One large wheel for one tonal range, with Hue, Saturation and Luminance sliders beneath it. This is where to work — the precision is worth the extra clicking.

Global

One color across the entire image regardless of brightness. Occasionally what you want, but it throws away the thing that makes grading interesting: different colors in different tonal ranges.

A Method That Works Every Time

Dragging a point around a color wheel and hoping is how most people approach this. A repeatable order makes it much faster.

1. Push Saturation Up to About 50% First

   Deliberately too far. You cannot judge a hue you can barely see, so exaggerate it while you choose.

2. Now Find the Hue

   Rotate through the wheel with the saturation high. The right color announces itself immediately at this strength.

3. Pull the Saturation Back Down

   To wherever it stops looking like an effect. This is almost always much lower than you expected while you were choosing.

4. Set the Luminance

   The slider people skip. Lifting or lowering the brightness of a single tonal range is what gives a grade depth rather than just tint — slightly lifted shadows read as film, slightly dropped highlights read as restraint.

5. Repeat for the Other Two Ranges

   Shadows, midtones, highlights. Same four moves each time.

Cool Shadows, Warm Highlights

If you want one starting point that works on almost anything: blue or teal into the shadows, orange or gold into the highlights. It is the most common grade in cinema for a reason — it exaggerates a separation that real daylight already produces, so it reads as natural even when it is pushed.

Then break the rule deliberately. Deep reds against deep greens, or warmth in the shadows against cool highlights, will sometimes produce something better precisely because it is unexpected. Try the obvious version first, then try the opposite.

Blending and Balance

Two sliders at the bottom of the panel that most people never touch, and they are what make a grade sit properly.

Blending

How much the three ranges bleed into each other. Low values keep shadow color strictly in the shadows with a visible transition; higher values let them mix so the grade feels continuous.

Balance

Where the boundary between “shadow” and “highlight” sits. Push it one way and more of the image counts as shadow, so the shadow color dominates. It is the fastest way to shift the emphasis of a grade without changing any of the colors.

Press and Hold the Eye

There is a small eye icon next to the Color Grading heading. Press and hold it for a live before-and-after of just this panel — not the whole filter, only the grade. The toggle at the bottom of the Camera Raw window compares everything at once.

Use both constantly. Color work drifts, and comparison is the only defence.

Fade the Whole Grade Afterwards

This is the feature worth knowing about, and it is nearly invisible in the interface.

1. Find the Small Icon Beside the Smart Filter Name

   In the Layers panel, to the right of “Camera Raw Filter”, there is a tiny sliders icon.

2. Double-Click It

   The Blending Options for that filter open — a blend mode dropdown and an opacity slider.

3. Lower the Opacity

   The entire grade fades proportionally. Everything you built at once, dialled back to 60% or 40%, without reopening Camera Raw or touching a single slider.

The blend mode dropdown is there too, and setting a grade to Soft Light or Multiply produces results worth exploring.

Your Eyes Adapt, So Walk Away

The most useful advice in the whole tutorial has nothing to do with sliders. Your eyes normalize to whatever they have been looking at, so a grade that seemed subtle after twenty minutes of work will often look absurd tomorrow.

Finish the grade, then leave it. Come back after a couple of hours, or the next day. Send a screenshot to your phone and look at it on a different screen in different light. What survives that is a grade you can trust.

Grade Two of Your Own

Download both sample images — one moody, one bright — because the same technique behaves very differently on each. Then grade something of yours, walk away, and come back to it. Almost every photograph benefits from a little grading; the discipline is in stopping earlier than feels right.

Tomorrow, Day 22 covers correcting exposure. For a much deeper treatment of color and composition together, our PRO Master Color Theory and Composition in Photoshop goes considerably further.